Trances and Beginnings
by flute-genevive
Summary: Entry for the Lion Lamb 15,000 member contest. 1st place fanfiction winner. Esme tells the story of Edward's love life, before, after and during Bella. Structured around TS Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady".


Trances and Beginnings

* * *

_1. Capricious Monotone_

When asked about Edward, the first image that pops into Esme's mind is one of billowing evening fog and a sunken, depressed boy emerging from its depths. He didn't meet her gaze until she reached to pull his face upward into the moonlight that glistened like water over both their faces. His eyes were a bright, condemning ruby and his lips were pink.

_Edward. _Her thoughts had never sounded quite so relieved. _Welcome home._

She clutched him closer, the son to replace the one she never got to know, and forgave him before he needed to be forgiven. He couldn't speak, but she heard the words in the silence. The guilt seeped out of him and into her; it was more than he could bear by himself.

Esme ushered him inside, where the lamps were lit and his room remained untouched.

~o~

He took to the room as if it were a sanctuary, furnishing it with more books than ever, and dragging the piano up the stairs, locking it behind the door.

When prodded about this moving of instruments, he muttered something lowly and under his breath. "So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul should be resurrected only among friends."

Esme blinked, confused by his spontaneous recitation of a piece she did not recognize.

Edward disappeared, flying up the staircase and settling onto his bed with a creak and a groan. He came down to hunt three days later, his thirst intensified by the human blood coursing through his system. The brownish tint that his eyes took on offered small comfort and little happiness.

~o~

It didn't surprise Esme that Edward did not like Rosalie; the discovery simply saddened her. He seemed hopeless, determined to live out his existence in a veil of self-punishment and deprivation. He wasn't attracted to her, nor was he about to let himself become attracted to anyone. Esme just wondered how long his mandated punishment by loneliness could continue before he broke.

~o~

Quite a while, as it turned out.

~o~

After years of watching Edward deny himself happiness, it took the arrival of yet another couple to pull Esme to her next realization.

Jasper and Alice stumbled purposefully into their lives, eager to disrupt the easy agreement they had all come to. Alice danced her way across the hallway, stuck her petite little head into his precious room, the first who dared to violate his sacred space, and waved. "Hi, Edward. I'm Alice."

Jasper furrowed his brows behind her in the doorway, pulling on Alice's arm to get her away from this psychopathic man who drowned his aching sorrows in journals and philosophy books.

The southern boy explored the library at long length and soon uncovered the scrap of paper, tucked in a desk behind a roll of bills, on which Esme had scribbled Edward's mysterious phrase so long ago. He turned to the woman, reading it aloud before musing, "I wouldn't have pegged you for a surrealist."

Esme cocked an eyebrow. "Pardon me?"

He merely flipped out an old and dusty book, fingers sliding to the correct page and continuing Edward's mutters from years ago. "So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul should be resurrected only among friends - some two or three, who will not touch, the bloom that is rubbed and questioned in the concert room."

Her remorse expanded tenfold as Jasper followed the verses down the page and Esme learned that Edward's lack of fellowship is about more than self-punishment. His lapse in communication had spurred on the doubts and fears that lurk in the corner of every human mind.

Edward trembled against the idea of humanity, but she whispered to him in his thoughts – where he cannot get away.

_You wish to be loved, and is that not the most human trait of all?_

~o~

They moved from city to city, and his skin crawled through freshman classes over and over again. Girls whispered in his wake, phone numbers and (later) email addresses slipping in his direction on pieces of paper that wafted the delectable scent of blood in pulsing fingertips. Boys frowned in his direction, shooting him glances and throwing murderous thoughts. Their fantasies made him smirk at his paper and tap the perfect eraser on the table.

~o~

Esme listened from the kitchen as he played his compositions with ease and grace, but never emotion. The beauty tinkled with flat notes, coming from hollow eyes and an even emptier heart.

She smiled sadly and praised him. _It's beautiful._

He looked wistfully back at her, and began to play her favorite.

Esme wished that his happiness could be so simple.

* * *

_2. Broken Violins_

Edward called her from his cell phone, and it was the urgency in the very flashing of the numbers on the screen that made her breath stop.

He began to talk, to hurriedly explain, the moment she answered. Though his words – thoughts – were dark and full of the sorrow and guilt of a hundred lonely years, there was something different in his voice, unrecognizable and slight, but there nonetheless. Esme clung at this new hope, and her throat tightened happily.

"Love you, Mom. I'm sorry."

She pressed a hand to her lips, which formed the beginnings of a smile behind her fingers, before whispering, "Don't stay away too long, dear."

~o~

They were gathered angrily around the table, everyone in the family seething at each other. Esme was having trouble not spitting at Jasper and Rosalie as they plotted to end this all and kill the girl themselves.

Then Edward volunteered to leave again, and she felt the words spilling out and echoing all around them. "No, Edward. No."

Emmett thought she was simply being practical, and he dragged the conversation on. But today, Esme was being anything but practical; she was indulging the fantasy she had been quietly concocting for Edward's future. If he left now, stole away in the night and refused to return for years, the girl would be gone. He would never get his chance. He would let his life, happiness, love pass right by.

She wouldn't let it happen.

~o~

He tried to be sly about returning to his room after the first night spent outside Isabella Swan's window, entering through the garage and going through the normally empty kitchen, just as the others left for school, speeding down the drive. But, all-knowing and clever in her own right, Esme was gliding and humming as she dusted her china in the kitchen cabinets. Edward stopped suddenly, surprised, his thoughts consumed by something else entirely.

He looked up at his mother, who had turned, one hand on her hip to examine him. His face was bright, the furrow between his eyebrows gone, but there was unrest in his eyes. She questioned him with a delicate raise of an eyebrow, and he smiled at her. Really smiled, and for a moment she let her thoughts slip through her guard.

_Perhaps his melancholy spell is over._

~o~

But Edward, Esme soon found out, could not find a way to let go, to fall, to slip slowly out of control and into the haze of love.

He was a bit overbearing at times, you see.

Bella had found him, lost among the waves, and yet he tossed himself overboard once again, determined never to be happy. He was complex, _damn it all to hell_, and this one little girl could not be the answer to years of solitude and sorrow.

He worried over her soul, his righteousness, her innocence, his selfishness; he made up reasons for them not to be together, why it would be better for them to push fate aside.

Bella couldn't – didn't – see the least bit of a flaw in Edward. She folded a tiny bit of paper, worn and lined from a notebook, and stuck it in the back pocket of a pair of Edward's pants – hanging in his expansive closet. In her scrawling handwriting, she had penned a line from the very bane of Esme's existence.

'You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles heel'

He had written back, though had never shown Bella his reply.

'You do not know, What life is, you who hold it in your hands'

Edward wouldn't admit it, but Esme knew what he would do soon. She had known from the very beginning.

~o~

He did leave, in the late afternoon on a chilly September evening. He had sent the rest ahead; Esme knew he couldn't bear to have them there, seeing him in his utter ruin. She felt sorry, not for his loss – for he brought that upon himself – but because he felt that he must endure this existence without Bella. His perceptions were skewed, and part of her questioned if it was her fault. She never was a good mother.

She left him alone for too long.

~o~

It took a tragedy, a game of violent, sudden death, and a very narrow escape before he came back to her.

He almost never came home.

(Esme had never been so terrified in all her years; that sinking, dropping, jolting feeling of horror when she learned her son – her beautiful Edward – planned to throw himself off a cliff of his own, chasing after his beloved. Her skin recalled the feel of the rocks at the bottom.)

She followed his step out of the gate with her eyes, wrapped him in a bone-crushing hug, and scolded him.

She'd be better this time, she promised.

~o~

Esme left a tiny note of her own, stuck to Edward's mirror when he hunted. The post-it note fluttered to the ground when she closed the door, behind the oak of the dresser, and was not found until Bella picked it up, curious and snooping and finally comfortable around the house again. She read it aloud, and the warmth of a summer blush flooded her cheeks.

'Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall

My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,

I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world

To be wonderful and youthful after all.'

_

* * *

__3. Evening Yellow and Rose_

Twilight came and went often now, another little changing girl to remind them of the quickness of time. Esme held her ever-growing granddaughter, telling stories like no grandma ever had before. The tiny princess soaked up the knowledge like she gulped her sippy cup of blood, always asking questions, always craving new imaginings to fuel her little brain. Esme wanted a child, but there was something even more gratifying about a little person to whom you had no parental responsibility but all the opportunity to spoil rotten.

Besides, Edward made a terrific father. He sat his little girl on his lap and ran her tiny hands over the ivory keys of the piano; she giggled and hummed the tune back to him. Edward winked at Bella. "I'll have her memorizing Khachaturian's Adagio in no time at all."

Esme waved goodbye, the child scampering away to be with her Jacob, and sunk into a plush chair in the living room. The glass windows offered a thin, transparent reflection of herself, Edward and Bella slinking out to be alone, and the small shoes that became one size too small while Nessie played on the floor.

~o~

All the Volturi, and every last one of their thick black capes, dissipated; Bella and Edward are settled in the cottage; the harsh tension between the Cullens and the wolves has thinned; but Esme still had the urge to fix something. There must have been someone who needed to be healed, a situation that needed mending.

And, sure as the sun rising the following morning, Edward and Bella had yet to learn that relationships are never easy. They didn't bicker like Rose and Emmett, didn't sulk like Alice and Jasper, didn't talk it out like she and Carlisle; they bottled it up, looked the other way, until it exploded with the anger of a thousand charging steeds. They had their own quirks, their own intricacies, own ways to cope.

She left a book on their bed - taking Nessie by the hand and going for a run to First Beach – with a line circled.

'You will find so much to learn'

She knew that they would understand. A few years ago, she would never have dared, believing Edward more than capable of misinterpreting her reference to the bleak third part as a confirmation of his lacking soul. Now, however, he had Bella, and she'd be able to tell him.

And tell him, Bella did.

It was never about soullessness, emptiness, or loneliness. It was, instead, about the confusion, the happiness, and the control that comes from putting others first, from living for someone other than yourself.

He nodded, understanding, because it is a concept they both knew well.

~o~

Esme smiled from the next room, politely turning her attention away when their stone skin collided in an apologetic embrace. She propped her feet on a leather stool, pulled out a book, and began to read. In a few hours, Carlisle would join her, and they recline on the couch together, arms and legs entwined, perfectly at ease.

They lived to see eternity come and go, and all the years in the world were spent in lovers tight embraces; forever didn't last long enough to satisfy the pulsing of perpetual adoration.


End file.
